Hot Topics:

Radio Host Stuns With Live Tweets of His Mother’s Dying Moments

64

Shares

Email this story to a friend

Scott Simon, host of NPR’s “Weekend Edition Saturday,” is sharing very personal and tragic moments with the world. Over the past few days, the journalist has been live-tweeting his mother’s final moments. As Patricia Lyons Simon Newman Gilband lay dying in an intensive care unit at a Chicago-area hospital, Simon is sharing both her experience — and his own — on Twitter.

In documenting these events, he is sharing the wide-range of emotions and experiences that come at the end of one’s life. Uniquely, the journalist has opened the door to an intensely-private tragedy and is allowing the world in to see what continues to unfold in his mother’s hospital room.

From touching to comical, his messages are both real and poignant.

“I just realized: she once had to let me go into the big wide world. Now I have to let her go the same way,” Simon wrote on Sunday.

This was followed up with a more light-hearted tweet about his mother’s dental floss: “Just spent 45 mins looking for mother’ favorite dental floss. Waste of time? Act of faith.”

I just realized: she once had to let me go into the big wide world. Now I have to let her go the same way.

Collectively, the tweets not only provide a lens into Simon’s personal experience, but they also force his more than 1.2 million followers to consider the highly-emotional human experience that comes with death and dying.

“Breathing hard now. She sleeps, opens eyes a minute, sleeps. I sing, ‘I’ll always be there, as frightened as you,’ to her,” he wrote on Sunday.

Breathing hard now. She sleeps, opens eyes a minute, sleeps. I sing, "I'll always be there, as frightened as you," to her.

As Simon reflects and shares his experiences, he is faced with a goodbye that will come all-too-soon. Throughout the night on Sunday, he provided a number of additional tweets that showcase the intensity of the situation.

From commenting about oxygen masks to his mother’s calls for help, Simon held little back.

Wish clever minds that invented the Space Shuttle or Roomba could devise an oxygen mask that doesn't slip every 20 mins.